With all the recent critical attention to Apple's manufacturing policies, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the company decided to push back. One way Apple might do this is by granting an "exclusive" to a media outlet that might put out a different kind of story than the one that people have encountered via the New York Times (1/25/12) or This American Life (1/6/12).

So here we have the news that ABC has been granted "exclusive" access to the massive Foxconn facility that has been at epicenter of the controversy over Apple's labor practices.

Why ABC? Forbes contributor E.D Kain sees a conflict of interest (2/19/12):

ABC's parent company is Disney Corporation. The top dog at Disney, CEO Bob Iger, sits on Apple's Board.

Meanwhile, the late Steve Jobs (and now his family) are the biggest individual shareholders of Disney.

Well, don't tell that to ABC reporter Bill Weir, who offers this classic defense on the ABC website. In the midst of the current scandal, the company reached out to him:

It was around this time when Apple called me. They wondered if Nightline was interested in seeing their iPhone, iPad and MacBook final assembly lines at Foxconn during a first-ever audit by the Fair Labor Association. I said yes, very much, and immediately started imaging the reasons why they were offering such a scoop to me, of all people. Among the possibilities:

-I've said nice things about their products on the air.

-ABC News is owned by the Disney Corporation and Disney CEO Bob Iger serves on the Apple Board of Directors

-The Steve Jobs Trust is Disney's largest shareholder.

-They enjoy "Nightline."

It must be the last one, because the first three would have no bearing on my reporting and I'm pretty sure Apple knows it.

Yeah, that must be it.

Apple has a reputation for being remarkably sensitive to critical reporting. It's highly unlikely that the company decided to grant an exclusive to a reporter they thought might do the kind of journalism they'd frown upon.

On the other hand, it's quite likely that they expected that Weir would give Apple the same kind of coverage he gave Wal-Mart, when he did a report for ABC World News (9/20/05; Extra!, 11-12/05) on "how Wal-Mart is changing the way the Chinese shop." Weir called attention to singing Wal-Mart workers and the "brightly-lit aisles" where "China's exploding middle class is discovering the novelty of free samples and a wide selection of everything." He also praised Wal-Mart's efficiency:

While Wal-Mart has changed the way people shop, they're also changing the way suppliers think. . . . Many manufacturers were shocked to learn that if they want their products on these shelves, it’s not who you know, it’s what you know about keeping costs down.

Apple was no doubt also pleased with Nightline's coverage (10/5/11; Extra!, 12/11) of Steve Job's death, when Weir said of the late CEO, "He was our Edison, our Disney, our Da Vinci," in a broadcast dedicated to "a visionary who changed the way we live, work and play, the man who gave us products we love and pointed the way to a future that he alone seemed able to see."

The ABC Nightline report is scheduled to air today, so we'll all be able to see if Bill Weir lived down to Apple's expectations.

Much of the coverage about the U.S. Postal Service tells us that it is losing money hand over fist. But one of the questions journalists are supposed to ask--why?--is rarely posed.

A letter to the editor in today's USA Today tries to fill in that gap:

Letter: Congressional mandate behind Postal Service woes

Your article "Anything Good in the Mail?" is misleading about the reasons for the U.S. Postal Service's financial problems. It focuses on competition from the Internet, conventional wisdom that doesn't withstand scrutiny ("Bell Tolls for the U.S. Mail, as We Know It").

Almost 90 percent of the red ink stems directly from a 2006 congressional mandate that the Postal Service pre-fund future retiree health benefits for the next 75 years and do so within a decade. This burden, borne by no other public agency or private firm, costs the Postal Service $5.5 billion annually. Also contributing is the worst economy in 80 years; mail volume always dips during a recession. The Internet, meanwhile, is a mixed bag; it presents challenges with people paying bills online, but also offers opportunities to deliver goods ordered online.

These points are reflected in the Postal Service's financial performance for the first quarter of fiscal year 2012. CFO Joseph Corbett announced February 9 a $200 million net operational profit delivering the mail, a strong performance he attributed largely to a 7 percent rise in shipping goods ordered online.

Overall, however, he reported $3.3 billion in red ink, with $3.1 billion of that from the pre-funding fiasco. This artificial crisis, unrelated to the mail, is the elephant in the room that needs to be addressed.

Fredric Rolando, president

National Association of Letter Carriers

Washington D.C.

With New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane continuing to puzzle over whether (or how) the Paper of Record should factcheck politicians, one might wonder whether other newspapers worry about the same thing.

Take USA Today (please!). Yesterday the paper reported on the very contentious matter of the Keystone XL pipeline and jobs--a favorite issue for Republicans. The paper (1/24/12) told readers:

Obama hasn't been willing to ignore politics, says Bruce Josten, an executive vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He cites several instances--from the failure to reach a deficit-reduction deal with Republicans last year to the rejection Tuesday of a jobs-producing oil pipeline--as examples of Obama's refusal to compromise.

Calling something "jobs-producing" suggests that this would be a major component of the policy in question.

Today the paper gets a little more specific in its report (1/25/12) on the State of the Union response from Republican Indiana governor Mitch Daniels:

He derided what he called "the extremism that stifles the development of homegrown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands."

That was a reference to Obama's decision against allowing the Keystone XL oil pipeline to be built from Canada to the Gulf Coast.

No, it's a reference to a myth Republicans and the oil industry are spreading about the jobs that would result from constructing the Keystone pipeline.

Last week USA Today counted 20,000 such jobs in a headline. I suppose the fact that some politicians like to claim that the pipeline would create hundreds of thousands of jobs makes the 20,000 number seem like a safe middle ground.

But that number is nonetheless dubious. Curtis Brainard has a pretty thorough rundown at CJR.org (1/24/12), explaining that the 20,000 figure comes from one estimate provided by TransCanada. Outside evaluations of the likely job numbers look different; the State Department's estimate is 5,000-6,000, and as Brainard explains:

In September, researchers at Cornell University's Global Labor Institute used the information in the EIS to come up with an estimate that was even more modest. Factoring in the various durations of employment, it calculated that "on-site construction and inspection creates only 5,060-9,250 person-years of employment (1 person-year = 1 person working full time for 1 year). This is equivalent to 2,500-4,650 jobs per year over two years."

The Republican Party wants the Keystone story to be about jobs, jobs and jobs. This is much easier to do when media outlets will print whatever they say without questioning it.

Time columnist Joe Klein jumped to Newt Gingrich's defense (12/19/11) when the Republican presidential candidate floated the idea that poor school children should work as janitors at their schools. Klein's endorsement (FAIR Blog, 12/9/11) earned him a coveted P.U. Litzer Prize. But apparently there's more to it.

As Klein explains in this week's issue of Time (in an article that bears a title "Racial Slant Aside, Newt's Poverty Plan Could Work"), "When you strip away the racial appeals, though, Gingrich proposes some very creative ways to address poverty and dependency."

He added:

And yes, as Newt suggested, that last idea did come from me--although I put a slightly different twist on it.

I first made the suggestion in 1991, after the New York City janitors negotiated a gaudy contract that required them to mop the cafeteria floor only once a week.

The difference, apparently, is that Klein wanted to see "students and their parents help keep the schools clean," and "not just poor students--all students, even those attending the city's elite high schools. It was a form of public service, intended to build a sense of responsibility and community in students of every income level."

Well, at least Gingrich was going to pay the kids.

How about expanding the idea further, though: Why not let high school students take turns writing a column for a national news magazine? It'd be a nice form of public service. And consider the benefit to Time readers.

On the Meet the Press roundtable on Sunday (10/30/11), talk turned to Steve Jobs. And, as one might expect from the avalanche of hero worship that accompanied news of his death, the chatter concerned how we might all one day live up to Jobs' legacy.

Here's host David Gregory, speaking to Tom Brokaw:

Tom, it's interesting, author and journalist Jeff Greenfield tweeted recently about Steve Jobs the following: "Imagine a Steve Jobs in the auto industry, in healthcare, in energy, even in government. We'd have a different country."

We know from Walter Isaacson's biography that Jobs had some pretty strong views about how the government should work--specifically, he wanted to "break" teachers' unions, and praised the light regulatory burden on corporations doing business in China.

That certainly makes Apple more profitable. But consider this passage from the New York Times' review of Mike Daisey's monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," about one Chinese facility:

While the official Chinese workday is 8 hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

Back to the NBC panel, where Isaacson was using Jobs' legacy to underline a point in Tom Brokaw's new book:

ISAACSON: I think that painting a vision for the future, saying "Here's where the country really ought to go," we all know the broad outline, Steve Jobs knew the broad outlines, which is better jobs, skills for those jobs, and a chance for everybody to move up. (CROSSTALK) Well, I think that we all agree that there should be a fairer, flatter taxes...

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

ISAACSON: ...but there should also be a reduction in the inequality in this country.

GREGORY: Right.

We all agree that there should flatter taxes? I don't think so.

And Apple, for the record, seemed to think it should pay no taxes:

Apple has made money so quickly and so prodigiously that it holds an outrageous $76 billion in cash and investments--an awesome sum thought to be parked in an obscure subsidiary, Braeburn Capital, located across the California border in Reno because the state of Nevada doesn't have corporate or capital-gains taxes.

If only such a company could dominate every facet of our lives, commercial and political.

Corporate media's incredibly uncritical boosterism of so-called "free trade" deals has been remarked on many times, and continues to be remarkable.

What else but blind faith would allow a story to carry a line like one in the October 12 New York Times, about textile industry opposition to the new deal with South Korea: "The production of shirts and sheets has shifted steadily from the United States to countries with lower-cost labor. Economists argue that this process strengthens the economy as companies and workers shift to more productive and lucrative kinds of work." Of course, if the Times has evidence of laid off textile workers' mass movement to more lucrative work, they're sitting on the scoop of the century.

Elite media's presentation of deals like those just passed with South Korea, Colombia and Panama consists of a barrage of unchecked claims: This time around, those featured funny numbers from proponents, who spoke of increased export growth without talking about imports--kind of like giving half a baseball score--and misleading context, like setting the deals within a storyline about jobs when there's no evidence such deals promote them.

Then you get a line, like that in the October 13 New York Times, once the deals have passed and been heralded as a "rare moment of bipartisan accord," that "the passage of the trade deals is important primarily as a political achievement, and for its foreign policy value in solidifying relationships with strategic allies. The economic benefits are projected to be small."

Some would call that bait and switch. For the corporate press on trade deals, it's standard operating procedure.

It sounded like it, but it was just Bill O'Reilly channeling Beck's Soros/MoveOn/Big Labor paranoia, minus the chalkboard:

On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren't exactly sure.

What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are being organized by some very interesting people. Does the name MoveOn.org mean anything to you? How about George Soros? Well, for the first time, MoveOn, funded in part by Soros, has openly allied itself with the protesters.

In addition, we have some unions in the mix: the United Auto Workers, the United Federation of Teachers and, of course, the always reliable SEIU. Of course, not all workers in those unions support bringing down capitalism. They don't. But their leadership is certainly sympathetic to the demonstrators.

But, again, what do these people want?

The common thread seems to be "income equality." Groups like the Working Families Party and the Strong Economy for All Coalition are basically socialistic outfits. They want the government to take money away from the affluent and give it to them, a nice deal if you can get it. And you can get it in places like Cuba and Zimbabwe.

The big money behind these protesters, Soros, he doesn't want socialism. Soros is the biggest capitalist on the planet. He wants power and these groups are using the far-left zealots to try to achieve that.

In case your tinfoil hat is not getting good reception, O'Reilly's point is that MoveOn endorsed Occupy Wall Street two weeks after it started, and George Soros contributed to MoveOn in 2003-04, and therefore Soros is "the big money behind these protesters."

Maybe the chalkboard would help.

Columnist Michael Barone, best known for editing The Almanac of American Politics, wrote a piece (Boston Herald,  9/20/11) declaring that Barack Obama's "Sellout to Unions Staggers Economy." After noting that "some pro-union moves have a certain ritual quality," he got down to the really troubling behavior:

Other steps are more important. Fully one-third of the $820 billion stimulus package passed almost entirely with Democratic votes in 2009 was aid to state and local governments. This was intended to keep state and local public employee union members--much more numerous than federal employees--on the job and to keep taxpayer-funded union dues pouring into public employee union treasuries.

Or, maybe, it was intended to stimulate the economy, since transfers to states and local governments are estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (TheAtlantic.com, 3/2/09) to be among the most effective means the federal government has to encourage economic activity.

And, possibly, there might have been some thought that teachers, firefighters, nurses, police officers and other state and local workers have important jobs that need to get done, and it would be better not to fire them.

Nah--that couldn't be it. It must have been an effort to fill union treasuries, the economy be damned.

Labor disputes are often about compensation-- salary and/or benefits. Management claims its employees are actually doing just fine, workers say otherwise. 45,000 Verizon workers are on strike on the East Coast over salary, pension and health benefits and collective bargaining rights.

One would hope that reporters would try to referee such disputes over compensation.  In the New York Times, Steven Greenhouse prints the claims side by side.

Yesterday:

Verizon called its unionized employees well paid, saying that many field technicians earn more than $100,000 a year, including overtime, with an additional $50,000 in benefits. But union officials say that the field technicians and call center workers generally earn $60,000 to $77,000 before overtime and that benefits come to well under $50,000 a year.

Today:

Verizon says its unionized employees are well paid, with many field technicians earning more than $90,000 a year, including overtime, with an additional $50,000 in benefits. Union officials say the field technicians and call center workers generally earn $60,000 to $77,000 a year before overtime and that benefits come to far less than $50,000 a year.

Now a careful reader might figure out the difference between Verizon saying that "many" tech workers earn more than $90,000, and the union saying the same workers "generally" earn about 1/3 less.  It's the same as saying  "many" Americans are millionaires;  generally Americans are not.

If the company is wildly overstating what its employees are making, news accounts should get to the bottom of it.

UPDATE: Greenhouse digs into these compensation figures a bit more today,  and it's hard not to conclude that Verizon's doing some funny math:

The financials of Verizon’s landline business are not the only set of numbers that company and union are fighting over. Union officials dispute the company’s estimate that each employee receives $50,000 worth of benefits each year. In that number, the company includes $14,700 for medical and dental insurance, $10,900 for retiree health care and life insurance, $10,800 for pension and $7,500 for time off.

Union officials say total benefits average $25,000 a year. Mr. Kohl, the union official, disputed the $10,800 yearly figure for pensions, noting that Verizon’s annual report said the company’s 2010 contributions to the union’s defined benefit plans “were not significant.” Verizon officials said the $10,800 was an average annual amount.

Mr. Kohl also said the $10,900 retiree health care figure was greatly exaggerated, asserting that many retirees had worked years to pay for that care so the cost should not be attributed to current employees.

Mr. Kohl also quarreled with Verizon saying the value of time off — vacation, sick days and personal days — was $7,500. He dismissed that as double-counting because that number was already counted in wages.

So the company's counting sick days and vacation as paid compensation? We've seen companies claim retiree healthcare as part of current workers benefits before. In any case, Greenhouse is doing today what reporters should be doing when covering this kind of dispute.

When you see a headline like "Public Unions Take On Boss to Win Big Pensions,"  you know what you're going to get-- more scaremongering about runaway public employee pensions. The New York Times delivers, with a lengthy front-page piece by Charles Duhigg that mostly takes the side of the Republican lawmakers trying to cut benefits in the name of fiscal discipline.

The article is largely based around Jim Righeimer, a conservative activist turned city council member in Costa Mesa, California, whose become something of a national star on the right. He can rattle off the anecdotes about sky-high pensions:

The city was on the road to insolvency, he warned, because public employee unions had pressured politicians into handing over generous salaries and pensions. The police chief received $298,000 a year in total compensation, Mr. Righeimer noted. The deputy fire chief had retired with a pension of more than $182,000 a year.

How typical is a $182K pension? The Times doesn't really explain, but they do suggest that this particular town's situation is typical for the state-- which is in terrible shape:

Costa Mesa, population 110,000, is California in miniature. For years, public employee unions across the state have often used their influence — sometimes behind the scenes but occasionally with public, hardball campaigns — to push for improved worker pay and benefits.

The Times could have mentioned that not everyone agrees with Righeimer's alarmist view. According to one report (Bloomberg, 4/8/11)  the city's budget officer says the pension estimates being used do not include union givebacks or changes in the state pension contribution rates. And it's worth pointing out that at one point the city stopped making pension fund contributions ten years ago, when the system was overfunded.

You have to go a ways in the Times before getting a dissenting view:

Public employee unions, in their defense, say politicians have unfairly made them into simplistic bogeymen, responsible for problems that have myriad causes. Not all government workers receive generous pensions, they note. A public worker enrolled in the state’s largest pension fund who retired in 2008 with more than 30 years of service received a pension of $66,828 a year, on average, and a retiree with 20 to 25 years of service received around $34,872. Public workers who retire with fewer years on the job receive even less.

So you lead with anecdotes about six-figure pensions-- and then give readers some sense of a more typical retirement later on.

As we've pointed out before, there are serious debates about the scale of the pension problems across the country; many see the shortfall estimates as overly pessimistic.  But The Times seems to have picked its side:

But no matter what steps are taken, the cost of public pensions will most likely preoccupy many states for years. In California, New Jersey and Illinois, lawmakers may eventually need to increase taxes more than 17 percent or cut government services to pay public retirees’ benefits, according to a nonpartisan study. In some states, no matter how much the economy rebounds, pension funds may not be able to meet their obligations without significant government support.

And later:

In some states, including California, a study found that pension fund managers needed to earn a 12 percent return each year for the next three decades to meet obligations. Such prolonged returns are far higher than historical norms. (Calpers, in a statement, said it expected to earn double-digit returns this year, and disagreed with the 12 percent estimate.)

It's not clear what studies they're referring to, but it should be pointed out that not every analyst takes such a pessimistic view. The Times does  report--deep into the piece--that the main California pension plan reports that they're doing fairly well:

Calpers says its retirement fund is healthy, having earned back more than $70 billion of the value lost since 2007.... “The costs of Calpers pensions for the state represents 2.2 percent of total general fund expenditures,” the agency wrote. “To suggest that pension costs are the cause of layoffs, degradation of our schools or the California economy would be irresponsible.”

So in the Times' voice, pension shortfalls are going to "preoccupy" states, and might require massive tax increases.  Dissenters may exist-- but they're not likely to convince the New York Times.

The piece closes at the Costa Mesa city council, with an ominous sounding show of force:

In the audience sat three local firemen wearing Costa Mesa Fire Department T-shirts, all of whom declined to give their names.

“I’m not here on anything official,” one said. “We just like the council to know that we’re watching them.”

Yesterday New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse (6/16/11) reported on efforts in several states to get public-sector workers to increase contributions to state pension funds--or, to put it more bluntly, to take a pay cut.

Political leaders are claiming this is simply the only thing they can do--and Greenhouse helps them make their case. Right from the start, Greenhouse frames the political shift as "the most definitive sign yet that the era of generous compensation for public-sector employees is ending." Many studies have shown that public sector compensation isn't actually all that generous, and such workers might lag slightly behind their private-sector counterparts.

Greenhouse presents the case:

The Pew Center on the States estimates there is a more than $1 trillion funding gap for government workers' retirement benefits in the 50 states. At the same time, many voters resent that public employee pensions are generally better than their own.

A trillion dollars is a lot of money. But over what period of time? And is that figure correct in the first place? Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote a great paper (2/11) explaining the origins of the crisis--which is rooted mostly the housing bubble--and that the estimates of one or two trillion dollars were misleading in at least two ways: Such figures might not fully account for a recovery in stock prices (which would improve the outlook for pension funds, and thus reduce the funding gap), and expressing funding gaps as a dollar figure absent any context is rather useless.

Express the gap as a share of the economy, and things aren't so alarming. As Baker wrote:

The size of the projected state and local government shortfalls measured as a share of future gross state products appear manageable. The total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product over the next 30 years for most states. Even in the cases of the states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product.

But it's Greenhouse's language near the end of the piece that might be the most galling part:

But with tales of six-figure pensions and public employees comfortably retiring in their early 50s, many lawmakers say it is outrageous that some of these workers pay nothing out of pocket toward their pensions.

Six-figure pensions are, as you'd imagine, quite rare. And workers who "pay nothing" for their pensions actually do pay something--they get some of their compensation in the form of a retirement package instead of wages. But these very exceptional cases get a lot of attention, as Dean Baker noted in his critique of Greenhouse's piece:

The media have been repeating tales circulated by right-wing and business organizations who are attacking public-sector workers and public-sector unions. In fact, the vast majority of public-sector workers do not retiree in their early 50s and do not enjoy especially generous benefits....

If the media had been doing a competent job reporting on this issue, legislators would be hearing tales of 70-year old retirees trying to get by on less than $20,000 a year. (Roughly 30 percent of public sector employees do not get Social Security.)

Journalists are supposed to challenge conventional wisdom and political rhetoric--not reinforce it. McClatchy's Kevin Hall wrote an exceptional piece on state pensions on March 6. We'd be having a very different political debate if more reporters were following his lead.

Labor journalist Mike Elk (In These Times, 5/16/11) made an excellent point after watching NBC host David Gregory interview Newt Gingrich on Sunday's Meet the Press (5/15/11). Elk wrote:

Speaking yesterday on Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that "the Obama system of the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] is basically breaking the law to try to punish Boeing and to threaten every right-to-work state."

While Meet the Press host David Gregory vigorously challenged Newt Gingrich on details of his personal life, he failed to challenge Gingrich on his false assertion that the NLRB was breaking the law by finding that Boeing punished workers for striking in Washington state by moving a planned new production line there to nonunion South Carolina. Despite the NLRB complaint against Boeing being one of the most high-profile NLRB cases in decades and entirely consistent with past legal precedent, Gregory failed to say anything.

His decision not to challenge Gingrich on the Boeing case is especially troubling since the main sponsor of Meet the Press is none other than Boeing. The top of Meet the Press' website proudly boasts that the show is "sponsored by Boeing."  No other corporation is listed so prominently as a sponsor on the website. In addition, Boeing is the exclusive sponsor of Meet the Press'  iPhone app.

This reminded me of Gregory's response last year when ABC's This Week started posting factchecks (courtesy of Politifact) of their guests on their website:

An "interesting idea," Gregory allows, but not one the NBC show will be emulating. "People can factcheck Meet the Press every week on their own terms."

I guess that's especially true when the subject is a sponsor.

In a mostly informative "news analysis" ("Ohio's Anti-Union Law Is Tougher Than Wisconsin's," New York Times, 4/1/11) comparing new anti-union laws that restrict collective bargaining rights in Ohio and Wisconsin, New York Times labor and workplace correspondent Steven Greenhouse seems at one point to adopt the framing and language of anti-labor politicians and pundits:

Moreover, at a time of huge budget deficits and of Republican dominance in many states, including states like Ohio and Wisconsin where unions once had swaggering power, the pendulum has swung toward the taxpayer instead of the government workers paid by the taxpayer.

Pitting "swaggering" unionized public workers against "taxpayers"--who are, in fact, mostly other workers--may be a tried-and-true strategy of anti-labor forces, but it doesn't accurately reflect the way the public see the issues. As the Times' own polling expert points out, Americans seem to be siding with public workers on the the issue of collective bargaining rights. 

Considering the fact that this isn't the only time the paper has pushed a false divide between government workers and nearly everybody else, perhaps Greenhouse would have more accurately portrayed the divisions had he written, "The pendulum has swung toward anti-labor activists and journalists, and away from public workers and the majority of the public who support them."

With a headline like "Public Workers Draining State, Local Pension Funds," I guess you know what to expect from Karen Tumulty's article in the Washington Post today (3/8/11). It appears the story's headline was changed somewhere along the way, but unfortunately the headline wasn't the only problem.

Her lead paragraph introduces an obviously unrepresentative case--a guy who somehow had 4 government jobs in one California town, and thus is enjoying a $500,000 pension. Tumulty writes:

Deals like the one he got rankle Californians at a time when the state's public employee pension plans are "dangerously underfunded, the result of overly generous benefit promises, wishful thinking and an unwillingness to plan prudently."

Down in the seventh paragraph, readers learn:

Fat pensions like Malkenhorst's are not typical, of course. AFSCME, which is the largest public-employee union, says that its average member earns less than $45,000 a year and receives an annual pension of roughly $19,000.

Oh, OF COURSE the lead example is not at all typical. That's Journalism 101!

Don't let those union numbers fool you--Tumulty gets word from a group to undermine the union's case:

But many retirees from state and local government jobs do much better than that. When the advocacy group California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility requested state retirement system records in 2009, it discovered that nearly 15,000 of the state's retired government employees were receiving pensions of more than $100,000 a year, with Malkenhorst topping the list.

Of course, there's a tremendous difference between the "average" pension and what "many retirees" are getting.

Tumulty then tries to claim that there's a broader sense of public outrage over pensions:

Fueling the backlash is the fact that the retirement system for government workers, especially on the state and local level, has become by many measures a significantly better deal than that available to most people who work for the private sector.

Again, there's been little evidence of this supposed "backlash."

Tumulty is absolutely right about one thing, though:

What makes headlines, however, are the stories of workers who exploit the loopholes.

The Charlie Rose show--which airs mostly on public television stations--has mostly skipped the protests in Wisconsin, one of the biggest labor stories of the past decade. This is not a total surprise--Rose seems to identify with The Bosses more than with the workers--so it was interesting to see how he finally approached the subject on his March 2 show.

The first guest was Time's  Joe Klein. He seems to identify with public sector workers, he knows they're not getting rich, but he doesn't like their unions: "Public employees' unions are a pretty questionable proposition," as he put it. The solution in Wisconsin is "to bring those pension plans and healthcare more in line with the rest of the public."

The next guest: far right Fox News host Mike Huckabee. He makes some jokes about raising the retirement age, then zeroes in on the pension problem:

So what I think the governor in Wisconsin is doing is what he has to do.  A teacher in Wisconsin puts in $1 for the retirement fund.  The fund puts in $57.  I don't know too much people who have a retirement plan.

That would be a remarkably lopsided pension plan. Where does that number come from? There seems to be little trace of it in the debate over Wisconsin. Some commenters at the right-wing Free Republic message board caught Huckabee's appearance and were excited to have a new anti-teacher talking point--only no one could seem to scare up data to support his claim.

General information about contribution rates for Wisconsin teachers can be found here--and you see nothing at all that would resemble Huckabee's formulation. And the Wisconsin pension system is relatively healthy, for the record--making this an odd focus of concern to begin with.

More importantly--what did Charlie Rose do when a guest made such a remarkable claim? He backed him up:

There is it seems to me a huge anger over the fact that people in the private sector see people in the public sector being able to retire with extraordinary benefits because they opt out at age 65.

People are outraged by public employees retiring at 65 with cushy benefits? This is not at all supported by recent polling data. You know what would help clarify things? Rose could consider an on-air clarification or correction. (Huckabee's been doing a lot of "misspeaking" as of late.)  Or he could challenge guests when they make such bizarre claims.

Or--here's an idea!--when the biggest labor story in some time is dominating the news, how about having some labor guests on the show?